if you want to go to heaven
by kathillards
Summary: The Armada invades at Christmas time, but there's no snow in California. She has never been in love. ―- TroyGia, TroyEmma


**notes:** so i set out to write a troy/gia and somehow accidentally rewrote super megaforce. in a really weird format, i apologize, i was trying something new.

i wanted to start from end game and work my way through a REAL full-scale invasion of earth, so that's what this is. note that it isn't an action-adventure story, it's about the megaforce team and their interpersonal relationships, growing up and being soldiers and dealing with ptsd and depression from the invasion. the plot starts differently from super megaforce but it segues back into canon eventually, just a bit darker and more grown-up.

that all said: trigger warnings for the above mentioned (it's not explicit, but i was definitely writing from a place of all of them being super messed up from fighting the war), as well as blood, sexual content, and language.

* * *

 **if you want to go to heaven**

 _he says, ooh, baby girl, don't get cut on my edges  
i'm the king of everything, you know my tongue is a weapon  
there's a light in the crack that's separating your thighs  
and if you wanna go to heaven, you should fuck me tonight_

– halsey, young god

* * *

The Armada invades at Christmas time, but there's no snow in California.

-:-

She has never been in love.

-:-

They end up separated, in the invasion. Gosei goes silent, Tensou doesn't know what to do, and all over the world, there are cries for help, people begging for the power rangers to come save them from the Armada.

-:-

She goes to New York. She's never seen snow in real life before, and now all of it is bloodied.

-:-

Their powers are weakening. Holding morphs takes too much effort; eventually she just stops, trying to conserve every last bit of energy that Robo Knight had siphoned into their morphers before he disappeared. Even looking at her morpher is painful – it's Gosei's head, and he abandoned them. She tucks it away in her pocket and fights the xborgs on her own.

-:-

Emma calls her sometimes, but it's hard to match up across timezones and in between battles. When one isn't fighting, the other usually is. Earth is a warzone, and wars leave no time for friends.

-:-

None of the others call her just to talk. She hears from Jake the least; she thinks this must be what war does to high school hearts. Stamps out the children and leaves the soldiers behind.

-:-

She is tired. She is so, so tired. It never ends, the xborgs keep coming, the monsters keep attacking, and it is so much harder to fight without a team at her side, without power at her fingertips, without a legacy at her back. People give up; Earth gives up. Even the old rangers – the Space rangers, Lightspeed Rescue, Overdrive, all those war-weary faces of the ones who came before her – stop showing up on the news telling people to never lose hope. The Armada is here to stay.

-:-

Harwood County is an ache inside her heart that never goes away. She takes to standing outside the high schools of New York, a new one in each city, pretending she's a protector, still a fighter, there to help. But all she does is watch as the children walk to and from class, surrounded by monsters on every side, only kept alive by the Armada's desire to watch this planet – the one planet that hadn't fallen to their Warstar fleet – crumble instead of collapse.

-:-

Hate is an unfamiliar emotion for her, but she thinks she hates the Armada more than she's ever hated anything before.

-:-

She can't save anyone. She can't even save herself. There are too many scars scattered across her body, much more than there ever were when she was Megaforce, when she was yellow, when she was one of a team. When she had her friends to protect her.

-:-

 _Earth's defenders never surrender._

-:-

It's funny how fast high school fades. She is eighteen and she's been fighting a losing war since she was sixteen. In another world, she might be going to college. In another world, she might be dating Jake. In another world, she would still be with Emma and Noah and Troy, eating froyo and laughing and taking pictures and being together.

-:-

She's still never been in love, but when Troy shows up in a flying ship above a park in New York City and shoots down all the xborgs she's fighting that day, she lets herself go with him. He presses a key and a new morpher into her hands and says, _We're going home._

-:-

For a week, they're alone on the ship. He says he found it stored in a cave on the island – their island, their old command center, where Gosei is gone and Tensou is deactivated – and made it his home, a new base for them. Tells her how he uncovered a treasure chest of keys, just like the decorative ones in the command center, but real, glowing, filled with power, and five morphers next to them.

-:-

Something changes in that week, a shift in the air, a simmering beneath her skin. She's never let herself look at him like this before, knowing that it would ruin their group if they did – but for now it's just the two of them, and their friends are fighting a million miles away, and there's nothing to stop her from doing anything, nothing hiding the naked desire in his eyes when he looks over her wounds, hands fluttering over bare skin, nothing to hinder them from finding peace with each other, if only for a little while, if only until they find their friends.

-:-

She knows it's something she'll regret, but she convinces herself that she deserves it, that he deserves it. If they can't save themselves, maybe they can save each other.

-:-

Before they reach Emma in a small town in Belgium where she'd been called to help, she kisses him one night after too much alcohol and too little left to lose. He doesn't kiss her back for a moment, and she's about to say _sorry_ , about to say _I was just hurting_ , because she's always hurting and she's always sorry, but then he does. He tastes sad, but he kisses her sweet, and at some point, they end up in his bed in the captain's quarters, clothes gone and inhibitions lost to a time before they were fighting a never-ending battle.

-:-

His body is a maze of scars and ink, war tattooed over every muscle, and she traces every new mark on his body like it's a bible she's discovering for the first time. There's a dragon tattoo on his shoulder blade, a scar three inches thick low on his hips, and a hundred other lines scrawled over his chest. She knows her body isn't much better, but he touches her so reverentially, she almost forgets that she's not a teenage girl in high school anymore.

-:-

It's rougher than she might have expected if she were still fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Younger, more innocent, less hardened. He touches her softly but his lips leave bruises and she screams – not his name, not anyone's name – because it hurts. Maybe it's not even physical, she contemplates as she lies there in the aftermath, her chest heaving, his quiet breaths lulling her to sleep. Maybe it's all emotional, maybe it's just the pain of knowing they never would have done this if the world hadn't broken them first.

-:-

When she wakes up the next morning, the ship floating over Europe, cannons aimed at every xborg they cross, he's not in bed with her. She gets up and puts on her clothes and finds him in the kitchen, staring down at his old morpher, Gosei's green eyes having long since stopped glowing. He doesn't notice her for a minute. She wonders what he's thinking about, wonders if it's the same thing she's thinking about.

-:-

She's thinking about Gosei, thinking about Tensou, thinking about Harwood. Thinking about Jake and how he used to smile at her; how he used to call her every day the first few weeks they were separated and then he stopped. Maybe he gave up or maybe he forgot or maybe it never really mattered how he felt about her in the first place.

-:-

Maybe they were never meant for love.

-:-

Emma smiles when the two of them find her, sitting in a café filled with nervous whispers as the monsters outside guard them diligently. Her smile is a little lost and a little sad but it's real and it's there and when she hugs both of them, her touch is warm and tender and everything she never thought she'd feel again. Emma says, _I missed you guys_ , and Troy smiles back.

-:-

She realizes she hasn't seen Troy smile in a while.

-:-

She realizes she hasn't felt warm in a while, either.

-:-

His touch is hot, but it's not warm. Somehow, it's cold, or maybe it just leaves her cold because everything around her is cold now. But she keeps kissing him, keeps sneaking into his room at night, keeps staying there because whether warm or not, it's something. They're alive, he's alive, and he lets her stay, and he kisses her, and even though he's gone in the mornings, what they do at night matters.

-:-

It matters because it tells her that she is still alive.

-:-

The ship seems brighter with Emma, happier and more full of hope. Even though Emma has been beaten and broken just the same as them, she carries herself higher, carries herself happier. It's a façade, they both know that, they all know that, but she keeps it up. She cooks them both real food instead of the frozen meals and coffee they'd been surviving on without her; she talks to them both, even if she's the only one talking; she calls up Jake and Noah and makes them all speak regularly again.

-:-

She asks Emma once if Jake still called her in Belgium. Emma looks confused, says, _Yes_ , says, _Why wouldn't he?_

-:-

She doesn't know why, but she pushes Troy back on his bed that night and kisses him harder than she has since they started this. It's not about Jake, she tells herself, and it's not about Emma – except, of course, that it is, because it's about _them_. The five of them, and the way they had been, and the way they should still be.

-:-

By the time they find Noah, she doesn't think anything will ever get rid of the ache in her heart, not Troy's touch and not Emma's smile and certainly not Jake's voice over the phone. Not with the Armada roaming their planet freely, not when they keep fighting general after general and never winning, never making a dent in their forces, never getting anywhere.

-:-

The first time Emma morphs with the key Troy's given her, the new pink suit appearing over her body, she pulls off her helmet, dark curls cascading over her shoulders, and Troy looks at her like he's seeing her anew, asks her what they should call themselves, if they're going to be a team again, a new team, a different team.

-:-

Emma says, _Megaforce, of course_.

-:-

 _We'll always be Megaforce._

-:-

The words are ringing in her head when Noah joins them on the ship, when he hugs them and whispers in her ear that he's happy to see them, that he thought he never would again. Her heart pangs in her chest; his words forcibly throw her back to that year she spent wandering the Eastern seaboard, trying to save everyone she could, falling further and further away from the people who had made her a hero in the first place, made her good, made her matter.

-:-

More and more often lately, when she wakes up alone in Troy's bed and goes to find him in the main room or the kitchen, she sees him there with Emma. Noah stays up late practicing swordfighting and figuring out how the ship's zord system works so he sleeps in late, but Emma is always up and ready with coffee and eggs or toast or cereal for the rest of them.

-:-

She starts to wonder how long Emma and Troy are alone together before she wakes up, how much Troy smiles when he's with her – not as much as he used to, back in Harwood, but much more than he ever did when he was alone with her.

-:-

It doesn't matter, she tells herself, because it's not like they're anything and it's not like they ever could be. It's need and desperation and the desire to not be alone; it's hard and rough and angry. It's not love, and she never expected it to be. She keeps doing it because it steadies her, anchors her, keeps her grounded. His touch reminds her that she is alive, he is alive, they are both alive and fighting.

-:-

Because everything is a fight these days, everything a war. Her heart is a battlefield, and he's a cannon about to explode.

-:-

Finding Jake completes them, but doesn't fill up the hole in her heart. He's as exhausted as the rest of them when they save him from an advancing army of xborgs, sweat running down his face and his arms bleeding. Emma gets him to their medical wing, bandages him up, and when he wakes from the medicine, the five of them are together again for the first time since the Armada attacked.

-:-

It feels weird. She thinks it must feel weird to Troy, too, because he takes her against the wall of his bedroom this time, hot and hungry and wild, not even bothering to get them over to the bed. They're loud enough that night that she thinks everyone must know, but in the morning, when she runs into Jake in the hallway outside Troy's room, he doesn't mention anything about it at all.

-:-

That feels even weirder. She doesn't know if it's him or if it's just because she misses high school, misses the feeling of being certain of herself and of her friends, of knowing where she stands with all of them.

-:-

They're all a little off-kilter these days, even Emma who endeavours to be the sunniest of them all. Troy takes them home to Harwood, where a new silver ranger has appeared in his absence to fight the Armada. She barely even registers his presence at first, too caught up in how it feels to be home, to see the empty streets of Harwood, the half-abandoned mall they all used to hang out in, the darkened hallways of their old high school.

-:-

They would have graduated by now, if they'd stayed. If they hadn't been called to fight. If Earth hadn't fallen to the Armada.

-:-

The new ranger's name is Orion, he's from another planet, he followed the Armada to Earth to destroy them because they killed everyone on Andresia. He looks haunted, just as weary as the rest of them, somehow older and younger at the same time. His story carves out another piece of her heart and discards it on the streets of a city that used to be her only home. If the Armada destroyed his planet, there's no telling what they'll do to Earth when the Emperor comes.

-:-

 _And the Emperor will come,_ Orion warns, his gaze full of shadows. _I found my morpher and they destroyed my entire planet to stop me from activating it. They know the other five morphers are on Earth. They're going to come for you._

-:-

She's shaking that night in bed with Troy, shaking from the cold and the fear and the nightmares. He keeps his arms around her, holds her to him until she falls asleep to the sound of his breathing, but when she wakes up, he's still gone.

-:-

Harwood is crawling with monsters, at the very heart of the invasion, the one city that had defended Earth against the Warstar fleet. Their new powers help, the keys unlock abilities that buoy her from the depression of war, just a bit, and Noah figures out their megazord and combines it with Orion's zord so they're all together again, fighting evil the way they were meant to, the way they had that year when Gosei had chosen them to be Earth's protectors.

-:-

But they're not the same, nothing is the same. Each monster is tougher than the last; the air around Harwood is filled with smoke and blood. She leaves scratch marks down Troy's back, and she knows they notice, knows Jake's gaze lingers on the two of them for half a heartbeat, knows that when Noah looks away, it's because he's disappointed, knows that Emma's smile fades a little when she sees them. She knows nothing will ever be as simple as it used to be.

-:-

She wants to say _sorry_ , wants to scream her apologies from the top of the sky ship, but somehow, it feels like nobody will listen. She wouldn't even know who to apologize to in the first place.

-:-

Orion asks her about the two of them, the only one of the team to actually bring it up to her face. They're on the beach after a long day of beating the latest general sent to attack, and everyone is wandering around the ocean, trying to find the energy to have a moment of fun. He asks her if they're in a relationship, if whatever's between the two of them is important, anything he should know about how Earth customs work.

-:-

She doesn't know what to tell him. She's watching Troy as he dodges Emma's splashes, his cheeks dimpling with a halfway-to-genuine smile, watching Jake as he takes his shirt off to join them and there's scars criss-crossing his back, watching Noah as he practices his swordfighting out there by the sea shore. She's watching her teammates, her friends, her family, and thinking that they all feel like mismatched puzzle pieces, trying desperately to fit together. Trying so hard to stay together.

-:-

She says, _I'm not in love with him_ , and Orion looks at her a little sadly, but he lets it go.

-:-

Monster after monster, general after general, the invasion never ends, and she starts wondering if maybe she should be in love. If maybe that's why she comes back to Troy's room over and over, craving his touch, the way he can make her forget everything with one kiss, needing to be able to forget. If maybe love is supposed to feel like addiction, if his kisses are supposed to be drugs. If she feels sad when he leaves her before she wakes up, it must be love, she thinks.

-:-

She's forgotten how love works. It used to be simple, used to be Jake had a crush on her and that was the end of it. Used to be easier to understand.

-:-

Some things, she still understands, like how Noah throws himself into his swordfighting because he has nothing else to anchor him to their mission, or how Jake is too old now for schoolboy crushes and he doesn't look at her with stars in his eyes anymore, or how Troy and Emma –

-:-

And then there are things that mean something, things that mean so much more than she wants them to mean, things she doesn't want to understand, if only so she can continue to be selfish a little while longer.

-:-

Emma never asks her about Troy. Neither does Jake. She can't decide if she wants them to or not, can't figure out if this is something they should talk about or not. Troy never brings it up outside of his room, never so much as touches her unless he has to, even though he smiles at her like everything is normal outside of their nights together. She doesn't know how she feels about that either, doesn't know how she feels about the way Jake looks at her sometimes, like he's missing a girl who isn't there anymore, or the way Emma looks between her and Troy with a sad smile, like she knows they're only hurting themselves, even when it feels like they're hurting her, too.

-:-

She breaks first. She and Jake are drinking out on the crow's nest after a battle that's left them both with new scars and she has enough alcohol inside her to ask, almost joking, _Remember when you had a crush on me?_

-:-

It's like the world stops spinning for a second. He stares at her, silhouetted against the sunset, his eyes dark and guarded. Her heart turns upside down; she doesn't know what she'd expected. Doesn't know what she wants to hear. Jake takes another gulp of his drink before answering, the words heavy and hollow when they come out of his throat: _Does it really matter?_

-:-

 _Yes_ , she wants to say, but she doesn't. _Of course it matters_ , but it doesn't. _We were something once,_ she thinks she ought to scream. _We were heroes once. We were children once._ But they're not. They haven't been for a long time.

-:-

She wants to kiss him, just to see how it would feel. Just to see if he'll remember, if he'll go back to the boy who smiled at her like she hung the moon, if he'll look sixteen again. But she knows he won't let her, knows because he tosses his empty bottle away and leaves her with a mumbled good night, knows because high school is over and they're not children anymore.

-:-

That night, she finds no comfort in Troy's touch. That night, she doesn't stay in his bed, going back to her room after it's over. He looks confused, but he lets her go.

-:-

At least this way, he won't get to leave her in the morning.

-:-

Vrak comes back. It barely registers on her radar, just another monster they couldn't defeat, another way they're losing, until he kidnaps Orion, and then everything gets worse. She feels like the ground is slipping out from beneath her feet, like somebody is carving a knife into her heart and letting loose all the demons she's been hiding in there for a year, like the world is about to stop spinning soon and she's going to crash over the edge of the Earth with nobody there to stop her.

-:-

Because nobody will stop her. Troy didn't stop her from leaving. Jake hasn't stopped her from doing anything in a while. Emma and Noah and Orion have their own battles to fight. Once they might have, but that's a time long gone.

-:-

Troy tries to save Robo Knight. He fails.

-:-

At the end of it, when the key has stopped glowing and the light has faded from behind Troy's eyes, every purpose that their mission and their new powers had given him gone, stolen as easily as Robo Knight, she finds him in Emma's room instead of his own. His head is bowed, her hands running through his hair, and his body is shaking as she holds him, as he holds her, as they hold each other in the light of the moon through the window, their ship sailing quietly across the skies.

-:-

She thinks about them for days afterward, the image imprinted on the inside of her eyelids, Emma with her pink-painted nails curling in Troy's windswept hair, the bloodied crimson of Troy's shirt bright against her sunwarmed skin, the way the stars shone outside, bathing them in the night sky lights. How they looked like something out of a fairytale, a Greek tragedy, a Shakespearean tale of star-crossed lovers. How he looked at Emma like she was his salvation.

-:-

The next time they meet in his room, she fucks him so hard he looks like he doesn't remember his own name when they're done.

-:-

It's all coming to a head, she knows this, they all know it, can spot the omens, can sense the Armada growing impatient with every defeat, can tell the Emperor is coming soon. The prince can only hold them off so long. The final battle is near and she is so tired, so exhausted, she doesn't even know if she'll make it that far. Everyone has lines on their faces and scars on their bodies that weren't there when they began; they stop switching legendary modes so often, constrain themselves to Megaforce, saving up their energy for the last stand, their last chance to save the Earth.

-:-

Jake looks the worst for wear, though everyone's moods are dark these days. She doesn't know if it's the strain of the war, of the new color that's messing up his energy, of her and Troy, or just the fact that his heart used to be the lightest and the Armada has crushed any humor they had left from their souls. But sometimes, she catches him boxing their punching bag on the lower deck of the ship, sweat trickling down his face, his eyes narrowed and focused, his hits coming harder and harder until she's afraid he'll break himself, and part of her thinks that maybe it's her fault, too.

-:-

Maybe everything is her fault. The way Jake looks at her and the way Troy doesn't. The way Emma's smiles are hollow and the way Noah sighs when he sees the marks on her neck. The way their team is falling apart, piece by piece, and she's the one who unglued them in the first place.

-:-

The only time Jake breaks his silence on the subject is after a battle where Emma nearly dies trying to protect Troy and later, when she's bleeding out in their makeshift medical room, three of them surrounding her, frantically bandaging her wounds, there's the sound of a fist meeting a face out in the crow's nest. She rushes out there first, leaving Noah and Orion with Emma, and finds Jake standing over Troy, his knuckles bruising, Troy's lip split and his nose bleeding.

-:-

Jake doesn't offer any apologies or excuses, doesn't say anything except, _You don't deserve her_. He sweeps past her and disappears into the ship, and Troy is left to look up at her through a purpling eye, blood streaking down his cheeks and jaw. She wants to throw up, or laugh, but instead she takes him to the kitchen and tries to stem the flow of blood, not looking at him, not thinking about his hands on her hips to steady her, not thinking about Emma lying in the other room, not thinking about how Jake had undoubtedly not meant _her_.

-:-

Because it's Emma. It's always been Emma. She can't hate her for it; she's always known, everyone's known. Jake is just the only one with the courage to tell Troy to stop fucking it up.

-:-

And the truth is, it's her. She's the fuck-up. She's the one who let war crawl into her soul and make a playground out of her heart. She's the one who kissed him because she was lonely and he was there and he didn't stop her. He never stops her; she thinks maybe he doesn't know how.

-:-

She thinks about New York, snow on the ground. The year she spent waiting and wandering and fighting till her blood ran cold. Thinks about those lonely nights in abandoned hotels, staring at her old morpher, wondering if she'd ever be that person again.

-:-

She's never been in love. She'll never be that person again. She fucks Troy because it's the only way to feel something that isn't dread, isn't hurt, isn't pain. The girl she used to be never would have started it. The girl she used to be would know how to end it.

-:-

 _You're being selfish_. Noah is only the second person to bring this up to her. Orion leaves them alone now; Jake and Emma won't say another word about it. But when Noah finally defeats Argus, it makes him a little braver, she thinks. More sure of himself. Victory overrides the exhaustion in his soul. He corners her, faces her down, eyes solemn and sad and understanding. _You're scared. You need to be strong again, for yourself, if no one else._

-:-

Last night, she'd fucked him on the beach just outside Harwood, after a battle that leaves the city halfway to ruins, the weight of her sins pressing down on her from the sun setting over the horizon. She's scared, too scared to end it, but all she can see when her body arches under his touch and her head is thrown back is the girl she used to be, strong and brave and yellow to the end, a girl who never would have touched this broken boy who looked at her best friend like she's the reason the stars shine.

-:-

She wants to scream. _You don't know me, you never knew me, all you know is the girl I was, and that girl died in the invasion._ She's shaking as she says it, she's thinking about Troy and how he looked at her last night, like he wasn't sure who she was anymore, thinking about the first kiss, the desperation, the desire, the craving for something, anything to fill the gaps in their hearts, even for a night. She's thinking about how he looks with his head between her thighs, lips bruised red, the flush of sex high and bright on his neck, eyes wild and dangerous and only a ghost of the Troy she knew, when they were young and unbroken still.

-:-

Noah asks, _Would you stop if you knew it was hurting your best friend?_ and she crumbles.

-:-

Of course she stops. She's not so far gone that Emma doesn't come first, doesn't come before everything else, even and maybe especially Troy. She doesn't hate herself enough to keep hurting Emma, can't fool herself anymore that she's not. Noah doesn't mince his words, doesn't speak lightly anymore, tells her God's honest truth and lets her do what she wants with it. She catches Troy alone in the woods, tells him, _We need to stop._ He doesn't look very surprised.

-:-

Emma comes to her room that night, holds her as she shakes from another nightmare. She says, _I'm sorry_ , says, _I know you're hurting_ , says, _He and I aren't anything_. It's not true, but it helps, just a little.

-:-

Just in time for their last battle, everything goes back to normal. Not the same, but better, more balanced, like the two of them had thrown the whole team off-kilter. There's no time for guilt with the Emperor on Earth and the full invasion beginning, so she locks away her heart again and goes to the final fight. Part of her has accepted the inevitablity of their deaths; the other part looks at Troy, looks at Emma, looks at Jake and Noah and Orion, and thinks that none of them are allowed to die.

-:-

 _Earth's defenders never surrender._

-:-

She is Megaforce, she is yellow, she is part of something so much bigger, so much more than a boy whose kisses leave bruises, so much more than a boy who doesn't look at her like she hung the moon anymore. More than who they were before they were chosen, the children they had been, the warriors they'd become. She's spent so long treating herself like the villain in a love story, she'd almost forgotten that she's the hero of a war story. Megaforce means together, means team. Means family.

-:-

They win. Earth continues to turn. Life goes on. They rebuild Harwood, rebuild the world, rebuild themselves. A month after the battle, she returns to New York and sees snow falling from the sky again, this time unstreaked with blood, no monsters around to terrify the children. She stands there and looks up at the gray clouds, the snowflakes dusting her skin, and thinks about everything that led her here, led her home and back again, led her astray and led her to her heart.

-:-

She stays in New York, ends up going to school there, but they all keep in touch, from California to Andresia. Orion comes by to visit all of them every month, brings gifts from his home, and Emma calls her every night, talks about everything under the sun except how Troy looks under the San Francisco lights without war weighing down his shoulders. Noah tells her ' _I'm proud of you_ ' the night before he leaves for Harvard. She keeps her key in her bag and her morpher in a drawer next to old letters and photos from high school and learns how to live without fear pulsing through her fingers.

-:-

Jake visits her in New York two months after she starts college, looking so different she almost doesn't recognize him and yet somehow still the same boy she'd known from Mr. Burley's science class. He's wearing green instead of black; it looks unfamiliar and unnervingly bright on him, but she likes the effect, how it looks next to her sunshine yellow dress, how it brightens his eyes and his smile. He takes her out for coffee, says he owes her an apology.

-:-

 _I'm sorry if I made you feel like I never cared about you, because I did. I'm sorry that I punched Troy for sleeping with you. I'm sorry that I made it seem like Emma's feelings were more important than yours._ His words hit her in the gut, but they don't rot away there like they might have, once. Looking at him, his skin tanned brown and his curls soft in the breeze, a hesitant smile on his lips, she thinks he looks like freedom. Like he's let go of his demons, the things that tied him to the person he used to be, the boy who was in love with a girl he never really knew.

-:-

She wants that freedom, too, so she tells him, _I missed you_ , and it's true. Jake laughs, ducking his head, and when he looks back up, his smile is warm and full of hope. He says, _By the way, you should tell Troy and Emma to fucking get over themselves and bang already_ , and his words tug her first real laugh since the war began out of her mouth.

-:-

That night, she phones Troy, then Emma, then stares up at the ceiling of her dorm room, thinking maybe this – the six of them, the battles they'd fought, the people they'd become – this is what it means to fall in love.


End file.
